Portable terminals have become necessities of modern life for people of all ages. Thus, service providers and terminal manufacturers are competitively developing differentiated products (or services).
For example, the portable terminal has developed into a multimedia device capable of providing various services such as a phonebook service, a game service, a short message service, an e-mail service, a wake-up call service, an MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) service, a scheduling service, a digital camera service, a multimedia message service, and a wireless Internet service.
In order to use a packet data service including the multimedia message service and the wireless Internet service, the aforementioned portable terminal must perform connection with an AP of the corresponding service.
That is, the portable terminal uses the packet data service by transmitting data to the AP. The portable terminal cannot use the packet data service in environments where the AP does not exist.
In order to use the packet data service, in general, the portable terminal searches APs which exist around it, prioritizes the APs with good signal strength, and wants to connect to the prioritized APs. That is, the portable terminal uses a Wi-Fi profile for storing a list of APs which were connected to the portable terminal and automatically connecting the portable terminal to the APs when the portable terminal enters an area where the APs are positioned.
The aforementioned portable terminal searches the APs which exist around it and provides the searched result to a user. However, the portable terminal does not provide information about positions of the searched APs (existence directions of the APs).
Therefore, when the portable terminal is moved to a position of an AP in a state where it searches only the AP which provides a weak signal by which an Internet service is not used actually, because it may use the Internet service and does not know the position of the AP, there is a problem in that it is impossible to use the Internet service through connection of the AP.
Of course, the above-described problem may be solved by an application for searching a Wi-Fi area. However, there is a problem in that the application may search only free Wi-Fi areas which are provided in advance by a service provider.
Therefore, in order to solve the above-described problems, an apparatus and method for providing position information of searched APs in a portable terminal is needed.